Older people write better digital content

I’ve just turned 41. I played football on my Birthday, ruptured my Achilles tendon and now I’m here with my leg in plaster. So I thought I’d mention one benefit of getting older.

Age (like laziness) makes people do things more efficiently. No unnecessary movements. The young squash player sprints about while his wiry old opponent barely moves from the ideal centre-T spot. The veteran wins (tendons willing).

Older writers learn to stay close to that ideal spot, because age brings wisdom about what does and doesn’t need saying. Ernest Hemingway (a particularly wiry veteran) called it iceberg theory:

If a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. (from Death in the Afternoon)

The art of omission matures with age. There are many exceptions (several at The Art of Explaining), but in an era that’s made brevity a premium product, I’ve found older copywriters are more likely to command the T-spot.

Thomas Heath

How to explain first time

‘If you’re explaining you’re losing.’ That phrase recently came out to bite President Obama, after he gave a 17-minute answer to a short question about healthcare and taxes.

Healthcare and taxes, human rights, banking, the environment … too many of the most vital messages get beached like whales in our attention deficit disordered world. People have to understand first time. Get it? Got it. Good. If not, you lose.

To avoid losing, answer these questions before you try to explain:

1. Who cares and why?

2. How will I make a difference?

3. What’s the big idea?

We use this approach for scripting everything except Post-it notes. You can too.

Step One: Who cares and why?

Who’s your audience? What are they thinking? And why exactly would they be interested in you? Great if you know these people as individuals. If not then imagine them into life — and don’t be afraid to get creative. One trick is to find and print off an image that fits the person you imagine, then brainstorm the page into a collage of all the things that matter to them, personally and professionally, publicly and privately. (This is also a great way to profile customers. You can go further and turn the collage into a magazine cover.)

When you’ve decided what they want, ask how they’d like to be told. You can do communication preference analyses, or just use gut feeling: would they prefer a slick presentation, a detailed document and time to reflect, quick-fire emails, a phone call, or lunch?

Step Two: How will I make a difference?

What exactly are you going to explain and what will be the outcome? President Obama spent 17 minutes attempting to explain the inexplicable. Healthcare and taxes? That’s a game without frontiers: you lose before you begin.

So take time to define an outcome that is specific, achievable, positive, imaginable and measurable. A well-formed outcome sets the parameters for explaining. And there’s a good reason why this is step two: to set a relevant outcome you need to see through the eyes of your audience.

Step Three: What’s the big idea?

You wanted to explain something, remember? Since then, you’ve worked out who wants to know, why they’re interested and what you can do for them. So take all this insight and sum up your message as one big idea. You can do this using the situation/challenge/answer method for introductions: if you describe the situation and the challenge first then the big idea should fall into place as an answer to the challenge. You should be able to state your big idea in no more than a Tweet (140 characters).

Get this right and you’ve won: from here it’s just a matter of reinforcing the message. By explaining first time you can start to change the way people think. Here are three starting points that have helped shape our world:

Earth moves round the sun – Galileo

People are basically good – Ebay

Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do – Dyson

How computer code can improve your writing

As a writer, more and more of my words are published online. The more I work with web developers and designers, the more I see of the dark arts of coding. And do you know what? Writing code is just the same as writing words.

Developers and writers are doing the same things – the only difference is that while I want to communicate clearly to my reader, my developer is communicating with a web browser. Either way, we’re both using language to create specific outcomes.

Not convinced? Well, let me give you a few things that a good writer can learn from their web developer:

1. Know your outcomes

When a developer starts writing a piece of code, they’ll always have an outcome in mind.

They might be adding a sign-up box to capture email addresses. They might be adding more navigation links to a site’s navigation. They might be changing fonts and layout. They’ll know exactly what they want their code to do before they start writing that first line.

It’s the same for a writer – you need to know why you’re writing. Are you sharing information, or encouraging people to act? What exactly do you want them to take away? How are they going to do it? So for an email newsletter, your outcome might be clickthroughs to a specific news article. Once you know, you can start thinking about what to say.

2. Everything needs a purpose

Every single line of code, every single tag, should do something.

It’s all too easy to lose sight of that on a long-running project, though. There might be leftover code from previous versions, or hidden functionality that you’re not using. A good developer will keep this to the minimum, and keep their code lean.

It’s the same with writing – especially with big projects like annual reports or websites. As you refine your messages, you realise there are certain things you don’t need to say any more. To keep the writing – and the thinking – clear, you must edit ruthlessly, and ensure that every single word has a strong purpose.

3. Separate content from presentation

Individual web pages don’t carry any information about how they should look – they just hold the content. No colours, no font types, no background images – in fact, not much more than the words. All this data’s stored in another file, a ‘style sheet’, and linked to the web page. A savvy developer knows how the two work together, and keeping them separate makes it easier to get things right.

It’s similar to putting your words into design. Writing means concentrating on the content first, and then working with your designer to present them properly. So take a cue from programmers and put together your first draft in a simple text editor like notepad. Only having to worry about the words can be liberating, and soon shows up any weaknesses that you might paper over with bold type, headings and italics.

4. Get the order right

Information flows best with a clear order. And unless you’ve got a very good reason, that means the most important stuff comes first and then the details follow.

In HTML, information needs to follow a particular hierarchy. Get it wrong and your site won’t work – it either won’t render properly, or the search engines will ignore it.

It’s the same for writers – if you’re not up-front with what’s important, people won’t read it. Make it easy to grasp your message from the start, and then follow it up with the specifics.

While HTML markup might be an unusual place to look for inspiration, there are more than a handful of similarities.

Pete Cornes

Don’t blame the messenger

Professor Michael Shayer of King’s College London recently repeated a study first done in 1976 to test the problem-solving abilities of 800 secondary pupils. He found they’ve got better at quick-fire descriptive responses, but worse at more complex reasoning.

Text message culture is widely blamed for this ‘dumbing down’, but let’s not accuse the medium — telegrams never made us stupid. What matters is the writer’s intent. More than 350 years ago, Blaise Pascal felt compelled to apologise for a long letter because he hadn’t time to make it short. Being concise is hard; it takes effort to pack a tight snowball.

Texts, Twitter and other messaging services force the writer to be brief, so we inevitably use them for speed. But what happens, what has always happened, when you ration the words of a writer with creative intentions? You get poetry. Consider haikus — ancient Japanese poems with a strict format, most commonly one verse of three lines, with five syllables in the first line (re-frid-ger-ra-tor — that’s your lot) seven in the second and five in the last. They’re popular as ever today for the way they pack meaning. Ten years ago Salon magazine began a mini subculture with a competition to rewrite Microsoft’s on-screen error messages as haiku poems:

Something you entered / transcended parameters / So much is unknown.

Your file was so big / It might be very useful / But now it is gone.

Three things are certain / Death, taxes and lost data / Guess which has occurred.

A crash reduces / Your expensive computer / To a simple stone.

The average character count for each of these is 65. That’s a lot less than the 160 you get to write a text message, or even the 140 allowed for ‘tweeting’ on the microblogging service Twitter.

So it’s unfair to blame lazy language and shallow thought on Messenger, Twitter or any other technology that forces conciseness upon us. The expansive Stephen Fry has become an unlikely champion of Twitter. Last week he found himself stuck with his mobile and time to kill, but took no more than his 140 character allowance to convey it all — fact, feeling and personality — in what has already become a classic ‘tweet’:

‘OK. This is now mad. I am stuck in a lift on the 26th floor of Centre Point. Hell’s Teeth. We could be here for hours. Arse, poo and widdle.’